Cinema of Intrusion: Power, Politics, Pleasure

Intrusion is a recurrent narrative trope across various genres in cinema. It entails a dramatic figure, an intruder, who enters a certain space owned by an “other” and changes the dynamics within that space. More than being a plot generator, the intruder — as an undesired, othered outsider — reflects complicated sociopolitical issues: the housing crisis, normative social arrangements, geopolitics, and colonialism and its legacies. Intrusion also comes to figuratively describe a microscopic attack on the immune system. As these examples illustrate, the relationship between the host and the intruder — which is understood as two opposing figures that both define and negate each other — is a dialectical one. Therefore, intrusion, as a concept, shows great theoretical potential for the study of the dichotomies of Self and Other, master and slave, home and foreign, and native and settler. This project will investigate how these dichotomies in sociopolitical realities are interpreted and reproduced in cinema through the figure of the intruder. Moreover, by theorising for the agency of the intruder, it will demonstrate that the subversive act of intrusion serves as a means to abolish the dualistic logic that differentiates the intruder from the host in the first place.

Throughout this project, a wide range of films will be analysed according to five “sites of intrusion,” gradually narrowing down from the broadest scale of colonised land and nation states to the house and eventually to the body and the unconscious. Each site amounts to one chapter in the dissertation and will be approached with different critical perspectives.

Objectives
• To identify and investigate contemporary global cinema’s interest in approaching the various sociopolitical and philosophical problems through the narrative trope of “intrusion.”
• To develop “intrusion” as a critical concept for the analysis of films and other cultural objects.
• To critique and expand the scope of existing Film Studies literature on intrusion by bringing in films, film theory, and philosophical traditions outside of the Euro-American cultural contexts.

Research Questions
• What social, political, and cultural factors contribute to the prevalence of intrusion as a recurring trope in films?
• Why does cinema repeatedly engage with themes of intrusion, and what political and philosophical implications does it (intend to) convey by doing so?
• How does a conceptualisation of intrusion (with a focus on the subjectivity of the intruder) enrich or challenge state of the art in Film Studies and in Critical Theory?